Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Series Editor’s Preface vii
Introduction 1
1. Assemblages and Human History 9
2. Assemblages and the Evolution of Languages 51
3. Assemblages and the Weapons of War 68
4. Assemblages and Scientifi c Practice 86
5. Assemblages and Virtual Diagrams 108
6. Assemblages and Realist Ontology 137
7. Assemblages as Solutions to Problems 165
Bibliography 189
Index 196
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd v
Series Editor’s Preface
It is a pleasure for this series to host the publication of Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory, the most recent and perhaps most lucid statement of his philosophy that we have. DeLanda is well known to Anglophone readers of continental philosophy – espe-cially among Deleuzeans – as a respected innovator in this sub-fi eld since the 1990s. He reached his current level of importance along a highly unorthodox career path that began with fi lm-making, passed through an astonishing period of self-education in philoso-phy, and came to fruition in 1991 with the fi rst of numerous infl u-ential books. He has worked as an adjunct professor in prestigious schools of architecture, and for some years as a faculty member at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. All the while he has been largely ignored by professors of philosophy but adored by graduate students – a demographic profi le that usually indicates a thinker of high calibre, a full generation ahead of peers. DeLanda’s popularity shows an additional element of paradox since his ontology is an uncompromising realism, still a minority position among continental thinkers despite the onset of a broader speculative realism movement.
DeLanda was born in Mexico City in 1952 and moved in the 1970s to New York, where he lives to this day in a spirit of under-stated bohemianism. As a student and practititioner of experimen-tal fi lm, he circulated in the New York art scene and acquired some international renown. The Manuel DeLanda we know today fi rst emerged in roughly 1980, when he began to shift his focus to computer art and computer programming. In an effort to under-stand his equipment properly, DeLanda resolved to teach himself symbolic logic, a decision that soon led him to the classic writers
vii
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viii Assemblage Theory
of analytic philosophy, which may help explain the clarity of his writing style. After a time he worked his way into the rather differ-ent intellectual atmosphere of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in whose works DeLanda found both a materialism and a realism, though ‘realist’ is a word rarely applied to Deleuze by his other admirers.
In 1991, not yet forty years old, DeLanda joined the authorial ranks with his debut book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. It is worth noting that this book was written just before the Per-sian Gulf War and General Schwarzkopf’s daily highlight footage of smart bombs going down chimneys: the fi rst contact for most of the global public with the coming intelligent weaponry. Military thinkers also took note of the book, and adopted this work of a basically Leftist thinker for serious study in their academies. This promising debut was followed in 1997 by A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, which explores the way in which various cycli-cal processes repeat themselves in natural and cultural settings, and is fi lled with riveting concrete examples such as an account of how rocks are reduced to smooth pebbles in a stream. In 2002, DeLanda published one of the great classics of Deleuze scholar-ship, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, which relates Deleuze’s philosophy in some detail to such disciplines as non-linear dynamics and the mathematics of group theory. This was followed in 2006 by a less famous but even more frequently cited book, A New Philosophy of Society, in which DeLanda developed the outlines of a realist social theory as consisting of different scales of assemblages. In 2010 there came the short book Deleuze: History and Science, and in 2011 Philosophy and Simulation, with its unforgettable discussion of thunderstorms, among other topics. DeLanda’s most recent book before this one was the 2015 Philo-sophical Chemistry, which examines chemistry textbooks taken at fi fty-year intervals, and rejects the Kuhnian model of sudden ‘paradigm shifts’ tacitly favoured by most continental thinkers.
DeLanda’s widespread appeal as an author can be traced to several factors. There is his great clarity as a prose stylist, the thor-ough research he invests in each book, and his impeccable taste in pinning down cutting-edge problems across multiple disciplines. There is also the utter lack of frivolity in his works, though his
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd viii
Series Editor’s Preface ix serious attitude is always coupled with a freshness that makes his authorial voice anything but oppressive. And whereas most con-tinental thinkers who turn to science quickly indulge in nihilistic aggressions and an almost religious zealotry, DeLanda’s version of science makes the world more interesting rather than less real.
While DeLanda’s admiration for Deleuze and Guattari is always in evidence, the present book offers more pointed criticism of these fi gures than we have previously seen him deliver. One point of con-tention is Marxism. Though Deleuze and Guattari work politically within a basically Marxist outlook, DeLanda is one of the most prominent non-Marxist Leftists in continental circles today. He prefers to Marx the analysis of capitalism found in Fernand Brau-del’s masterful three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, with its attention to different scales of markets and its crucial distinction between markets and monopoly capitalism. Given Braudel’s con-ception of society as a ‘set of sets’, of intertwined assemblages of all different sizes, it is no longer possible to reify ‘Capitalism’ in the manner of ‘Society’, ‘the State’, or ‘the Market’. (A striking similarity, by the way, between DeLanda and Bruno Latour, whose anti-realist tendencies repel DeLanda immeasurably more than they do me.) And whereas Braudel traces the birth of capitalism to maritime cities such as Venice, Genoa, Lisbon, and Amsterdam, Deleuze and Guattari retain the Marxist prejudice that since bank-ing and commerce are ‘unproductive’, such cities cannot possibly have been the birthplace of capitalism, which Deleuze and Guat-tari therefore link to the state rather than the commercial city. DeLanda objects not only to this assumption, but also to the old Marxist chestnut about ‘the tendency of the rate of profi t to fall’, a ‘tendency’ that DeLanda bluntly proclaims ‘fi ctitious’.
He adds that Deleuze and Guattari remain too committed to an ontology of ‘individuals, groups, and social fi elds’, which cannot account for Braudel’s attention to economic organisations and cit-ies. This leads DeLanda to more general conclusions that are sure to spark controversy: ‘Much of the academic left today has become prey to the double danger of politically targeting reifi ed generalities (Power, Resistance, Capital, Labour) while at the same time aban-doning realism.’ Any new left worthy of the name would need to ‘[recover] its footing on a mind-independent reality and . . . [focus]
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd ix
x Assemblage Theory
its efforts at the right social scale, that is . . . [leave] behind the dream of a Revolution that changes the entire system’. Along with Marx, DeLanda fi nds an additional target on the left in the person of Noam Chomsky, whose linguistics he sees as too dependent on an ontology of internal relations.
On other fronts, however, DeLanda takes a more positive Deleuzean line in a way that runs counter to present-day Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). For instance, DeLanda has no use for the concept of essence. He critiques Aristotle’s conception of formal cause, which OOO adores. DeLanda further advocates a genetic-historical rather than synchronic approach to individuation, draw-ing on Gilbert Simondon no less than Deleuze. And whereas OOO advocates realism without materialism, DeLanda insists on a close alliance between the two terms, which he seems to use more or less as synonyms.
Although Assemblage Theory is a refi ned presentation of an already long intellectual trajectory, its clarity of style and wealth of examples also make it a suitable introduction to DeLanda’s work more generally. Here we have one of the most formidable thinkers in present-day continental philosophy, moulded by his own hard work and insight, with no support from the traditional institutions of philosophy through which most of us have passed, willingly or not. DeLanda’s resulting independence of mind makes him one of the crucial dialogue partners for anyone wishing to see contem-porary philosophy with their own eyes. We are fortunate indeed to welcome Manuel DeLanda to the Speculative Realism series at Edinburgh University Press.
Graham Harman Dubuque, Iowa August 2015
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd x
1
Introduction
Writing a book about the concept of assemblage presents various challenges. The easiest one to meet is terminological. The word in English fails to capture the meaning of the original agencement, a term that refers to the action of matching or fi tting together a set of components (agencer), as well as to the result of such an action: an ensemble of parts that mesh together well. The English word used as translation captures only the second of these mean-ings, creating the impression that the concept refers to a product not a process. If this were the only challenge it could be easily bypassed. We could simply take the term agencement to be the name of the concept, the concept itself being given by its defi ni-tion. But this way out is blocked by the fact that the concept is given half a dozen different defi nitions by its creators, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Each defi nition connects the concept to a separate aspect of their philosophy, using the terms that are relevant for that aspect, so when taken in isolation the different defi nitions do not seem to yield a coherent notion. This book is an attempt to bring these different defi nitions together, introducing and illustrating the terms required to make sense of them. We can begin with the simplest defi nition, one involving a minimum of additional conceptual machinery:
What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never fi liations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind.1
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd 1
2 Assemblage Theory
In this defi nition, two aspects of the concept are emphasised: that the parts that are fi tted together are not uniform either in nature or in origin, and that the assemblage actively links these parts together by establishing relations between them. The con-trast between fi liations and alliances gives us a clue regarding the type of relationships needed to hold the parts together. Some rela-tions, such as that between parents and their offspring, or those between brothers or sisters, defi ne the very identity of the terms that they relate. One can only be a father if one is related genea-logically to a son or a daughter, and vice versa, so that the identity of the role of father, or of that of son or daughter, cannot exist outside their mutual relation. Traditionally, these relations are des-ignated as relations of interiority. On the other hand, when two groups of people related by descent enter into a political alliance, this relation does not defi ne their identity but connects them in exteriority. It is a relation established between the two groups, like the air that exists between them transmitting infl uences that connect them but do not constitute them.2 The terms ‘interiority’
and ‘exteriority’ are somewhat misleading because they suggest a spatial relation, a relation internal or external to something. A bet-ter choice would be intrinsic and extrinsic, but the intent is clear: if a relation constitutes the very identity of what it relates it cannot respect the heterogeneity of the components, but rather it tends to fuse them together into a homogeneous whole.
The majority of relations in the world are extrinsic. Intrinsic relations tend to be confi ned to niches, such as social roles defi ned by conventions. For there to be a convention, there must be alter-native ways in which the identity of a social role is defi ned, and the choice among the alternatives must be arbitrary. Family relations, for example, vary across cultures, as do the rights and obligations attached to the role of parents, offspring, and relatives. So the fi x-ing of one of these alternatives by an arbitrary social code con-stitutes its very identity. A similar situation arises in biology with respect to the roles that organisms of the same species play relative to one another. When the behaviour of an organism is not learned but is rigidly coded by its genes, and when there exist alternative behavioural patterns that could have performed the same func-tion, its identity can be considered to be determined by relations
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd 2
Introduction 3 of interiority. Hence Deleuze’s attraction to the ecological relation
of symbiosis, as in the relation between insects and the plants they pollinate, because it involves heterogeneous species interacting in exteriority, and their relation is not necessary but only contingently obligatory, a relation that does not defi ne the very identity of the symbionts. In both the social and biological cases, intrinsic rela-tions are such because they are coded, and because the code arbi-trarily selects one alternative over the rest. This suggests that the opposition between the two types of social ensembles mentioned in the previous quotation, those linked by fi liation and alliance, respectively, may be captured by a single concept equipped with a variable parameter, the setting of which determines whether the ensemble is coded or decoded.
Chapter 1 explores this possibility. In their exposition of assemblage theory Deleuze and Guattari tend to use a series of oppositions: tree/rhizome, striated/smooth, molar/molecular, and stratum/assemblage. But they constantly remind us that the oppo-sites can be transformed into one another. In particular, the kinds of ensembles designated as ‘assemblages’ can be obtained from strata by a decoding operation.3 But if one member of these
dichot-omies can be transformed into the other then the oppositions can be replaced with a single parametrised term capable of existing in two different states. This yields a different version of the concept of assemblage, a concept with knobs that can be set to different values to yield either strata or assemblages (in the original sense). The coding parameter is one of the knobs we must build into the concept, the other being territorialisation, a parameter measuring the degree to which the components of the assemblage have been subjected to a process of homogenisation, and the extent to which its defi ning boundaries have been delineated and made imperme-able. A further modifi cation to the original concept is that the parts matched together to form an ensemble are themselves treated as assemblages, equipped with their own parameters, so that at all times we are dealing with assemblages of assemblages. Using this modifi ed version of the concept, Chapter 1 goes on to detail a materialist social ontology in which communities and organisa-tions, cities and countries, are shown to be amenable to a treat-ment in terms of assemblages.
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd 3
4 Assemblage Theory
Chapter 2 uses this social ontology as a context to discuss the assemblage approach to language. As is well known, Deleuze and Guattari were highly critical of orthodox linguistics, and adopted ideas from sociolinguistics to study language in its communal and institutional context. A tightly knit community, for example, is an ensemble of bodies (not only the biological bodies of the neigh-bours, but also the architectural bodies of their houses, churches, pubs, and so on) in which the fi tting together is performed by lin-guistic acts that create social obligations among the neighbours. A promise between community members must be kept, else the reputation of the member breaking it will suffer, and he or she may be punished with ostracism. Similarly, a military or corpo-rate organisation is an ensemble of bodies (including the bodies of their weapons and machines) in which commands create the bonds that fi t them together: after being commanded to do some-thing a subordinate is held responsible for the fulfi lment of the command, and punished for disobeying it. Social ensembles held together by enforceable obligations are referred to by the authors as ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’.4 However, their
discus-sion of this important concept is hampered by a social ontology that includes only three levels: individuals, groups, and the social fi eld. A more fi nely grained ontology, with many levels of social ensembles between the person and society as a whole, will help us to clarify and extend their ideas about language.
Chapter 3 concentrates on a specifi c social organisation, the army. One of the earliest illustrations of an assemblage was the warrior–horse–bow ensemble of the nomads.5 This assemblage can
become a component part of a larger one, a nomad army, while its own components can also be treated as assemblages: the bow as an ensemble of a fl exible arc, a string, and a projectile.6 And similarly
for a Second World War army as an assemblage of platoons, them-selves composed of soldiers, their rifl es, and their radios. Armies are therefore a perfect example of a nested set of assemblages. In the history of armies we can detect transformations that add to their fl exibility or that, on the contrary, make them more rigid and obedient. These transformations can be modelled by setting the parameters of the assemblage to the right settings, a task that is greatly simplifi ed if an assemblage’s components have parameters
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd 4
Introduction 5 of their own. This way, we can locate the right level in the nested
set at which the coding or territorialisation occurred, and do jus-tice to the complexity of the historical record.
Chapter 4 discusses scientifi c fi elds, viewed as assemblages of a domain of laboratory phenomena, a community of practitioners, and the techniques and instrumentation that fi t one to the other. Unlike other approaches, in which the cognitive items governing scientifi c practices (concepts, statements, problems, explanations, classifi cations) are viewed as related to one another in interiority, forming a monolithic paradigm from which there is no escape short of a religious conversion, in this chapter we explore the idea that cognitive tools are not fused into a totality but rather coexist and interact in exteriority. The distinction between strata and assem-blages in this case corresponds to what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as major and minor sciences. An example of a major science is an axiomatised version of classical physics, in which immutable truths about nature’s laws are used as self-evident axioms, while deductive logic is used to derive in a uniform way an unlimited number of further truths (theorems). An illustration of a minor sci-ence would be chemistry, a fi eld that resists axiomatisation and in which the phenomena in the domain continuously confront parti-tioners with variation, even as they strive to fi nd constants, posing new problems for them to solve.7 In this case too, we can replace
the dichotomy major/minor by a single concept, while deriving the very real distinctions discussed by the authors from the settings of the parameters. And as in the case of armies, scientifi c fi elds can also be treated as assemblages of assemblages, allowing us to locate at the right level of the nested set the changes brought about by the conditions created by the settings of the parameters
Chapter 5 tackles the most diffi cult notion in this approach: the diagram of an assemblage. An ensemble in which components have been correctly matched together possesses properties that its components do not have. It also has its own tendencies and capaci-ties. The latter are real but not necessarily actual if they are not currently manifested or exercised. The term for something that is real but not actual is virtual. An assemblage’s diagram captures this virtuality, the structure of the possibility space associated with an assemblage’s dispositions. But in addition to defi ning a virtual
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd 5
6 Assemblage Theory
space already caught up into actual ensembles, trapped into their materiality and expressivity to a degree specifi ed by the param-eters, the diagram connects an assemblage with other diagrams, and with a cosmic space in which diagrams exist free from the constraints of actuality. While the ontological status of disposi-tions that are not currently being manifested is controversial, the existence of the cosmic plane is clearly much more so. Neverthe-less, this chapter strives to show that both are compatible with a materialist metaphysics.
Chapter 6 deals with another metaphysical question: all assem-blages should be considered unique historical entities, singular in their individuality, not as particular members of a general cate-gory. But if this is so, then we should be able to specify the indi-viduation process that gave birth to them. In the previous chapter we had already begun to use examples of assemblages belonging to the natural world, proof that the approach is not confi ned to social assemblages, an emphasis that continues into this chapter. The individuation processes behind physical atoms and biological species are used as illustrations. Chapter 7, fi nally, returns to the question of the virtual diagram of an assemblage, but this time to connect this notion to epistemological rather than ontological questions. It is the most technical chapter, because a rigorous dis-cussion of diagrams must proceed using concepts from mathemat-ics, but it introduces all the necessary notions in clear technical and historical detail.
What gets lost in this new version of the concept of assemblage? Not much. The rich descriptions made by Deleuze and Guattari of rhizomes versus trees, or of molecular fl ows versus molar aggre-gates, or of smooth spaces versus striated ones, are all recover-able as descriptions of qualitatively different phases of one and the same entity, making these renditions every bit as useful as a detailed portrayal of the differences between a substance in the liquid and crystalline states. Hence, the change in this respect boils down to a matter of emphasis: using strata and assemblages as distinct categories allows one to stress their very important differ-ences, even if it complicates the discussion of their mutual trans-formations.8 The other change, conceiving of the components of
an assemblage as themselves assemblages, is also harmless, as is
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd 6
Introduction 7 the idea that the environment of an assemblage is itself an
assem-blage. The authors introduce further categories of being to defi ne the different kind of components, like the category ‘bodies’ for the working parts of ‘machinic assemblages’, and use words like ‘con-ditions’ to defi ne the larger context in which an assemblage oper-ates.9 But their tendency to view the world (natural and social)
in terms of two (or three) levels makes the expression ‘the larger context’ particularly dangerous, since it ends up engulfi ng what in reality is a multi-level ontology. Hence, replacing bodies (and other component types) and contextual conditions by smaller and larger assemblages, respectively, allows us to sidestep this diffi culty. It also yields a view of reality in which assemblages are everywhere, multiplying in every direction, some more viscous and changing at slower speeds, some more fl uid and impermanent, coming into being almost as fast as they disappear. And at the limit, at the critical threshold when the diagrams of assemblages reach escape velocity, we fi nd the grand cosmic assemblage, the plane of imma-nence, consistency, or exteriority.
Notes
1. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 69.
2. The theme of fi liation versus alliance is discussed in detail in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 147, 155.
3. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 503. ‘Assemblages are already different from strata. They are produced in the strata, but operate in zones where milieus become decoded.’
4. Ibid., p. 88. The authors refer to the assemblage of bodies as a ‘machinic assemblage’, the term ‘machinic’ meaning the synthesis of heterogeneities as such (ibid., p. 330). In this book the distinction between machinic and collective assemblages is treated as the dis-tinction between material and expressive components. The authors sometimes express themselves that way: ‘We think the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to the production of goods but rather to a precise state of interminglings of bodies in society . . .’ (ibid., p. 90).
5. The earliest mention of the man–horse–bow ensemble occurs in a text that was published as an appendix to some editions of Anti-Oedipus. The text has been republished as part of a collection of essays by
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd 7
8 Assemblage Theory
Guattari. See ‘Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines’, in Guattari, Chaosophy, p. 91.
6. The authors do not approach armies using a nested set of assem-blages. The soldier and his weapons are considered an assemblage, but the weapons are referred to as ‘technical objects’, while a whole army (e.g. a sedentary army broken into phalanxes) is thought of as providing the conditions for the emergence of the assemblage: ‘The Greek foot soldier together with his arms constitute a machine under the conditions of the phalanx’ (ibid., p. 91).
7. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 361–2. The authors do not use chemistry as their example of a minor science but metal-lurgy. Chemistry was born from the material culture of blacksmiths, pharmacists, and alchemists, but it is supposed to have become major with the work of Lavoisier (ibid., p. 370). This is in fact a misconception that this chapter attempts to correct.
8. The transformations between strata and assemblages are character-ised like this: ‘A single assemblage can borrow from different strata, and with a certain amount of apparent disorder; conversely, a stra-tum or element of a strastra-tum can join others in functioning in a dif-ferent assemblage. Finally, the machinic assemblage is . . . also in touch with the plane of consistency and necessarily effectuates the abstract machine’ (ibid., p. 73). In this quotation we can see that the components of one kind of ensemble can become a part of the other kind of ensemble. Assemblages are also described as operating within strata, forming the machinery that performs the articulations of material and expressive components (ibid., p. 67). On the other hand, what seems like a radical difference is also mentioned: only assemblages can effectuate an abstract machine, that is, only assem-blages have a diagram. This seems entirely unjustifi ed, as it denies stratifi ed ensembles the possibility of having dispositions in a non-actual state. This statement is valid only to the extent that the setting of the parameters that yields the ‘assemblage state’ also determine that this state is much ‘closer’ to the state of the plane of consistency in a sense to be defi ned in Chapter 5.
9. See remarks in notes 4 and 6 above.
4983_Assemblage Theory.indd 8
Chapter One.
!
Assemblages and Human History.
We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary,
colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all those particular parts but does not unify them; rather it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.
!
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The Anti-Oedipus. 1
!
!
!
A very important question confronting any serious attempt to think about human history is the nature of the social entities considered to be legitimate agents. One can, of course, include only human beings as agents, either as rational
decision-makers (as in micro-economics) or as phenomenological subjects (as in micro-sociology). But if we wish to go beyond this we need a proper
conceptualization of social wholes. The very first step in this task is to devise a means to block micro-reductionism, a step usually achieved by the concept of
emergent properties, properties of a whole that are not present in its parts. If a
social whole has properties that emerge from the interactions between people, its reduction to a mere aggregate of many rational decision makers or many
phenomenological experiences is effectively blocked. But this leaves open the possibility of macro-reductionism, as when one rejects the rational actors of micro-economics in favor of society as a whole, a society that fully determines the nature of its members. Blocking macro-reductionism demands a second concept, the concept of relations of exteriority between parts. Unlike wholes in which “being part of this whole” is a defining characteristic of the parts, that is, wholes in which the parts cannot subsist independently of the relations they have with each other (relations of interiority) we need to conceive of emergent wholes in which the parts retain a relative autonomy, so that they can be detached from one whole and
plugged into another one entering into new interactions. The terms “exteriority” and “interiority”, although sanctioned by tradition, are misleading, since they suggest a spatial relation (external, internal). A better choice would be “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” since the question is whether the very identity of the components is determined by their relations. We may accept the traditional terminology as long as we keep in mind that we are not invoking anything spatial: the relations among parts of the brain, for example, are relations of exteriority despite the fact that these parts are in the interior of the body.
!
With these two concepts (emergence and exteriority) we can define social wholes, like interpersonal networks or institutional organizations, that cannot be
reduced to the persons that compose them, and that, at the same time, do not totalize those persons, fusing them into a seamless whole in which their
individuality is lost. Take for example the tightly-knit communities that inhabit small towns, or ethnic neighborhoods in large cities. In these communities an important emergent property is the degree to which their members are linked together. One way of examining this property is to study the network of neighbors, counting the number of direct and indirect links per neighbor, that is, friends and friends of friends, and studying its connectivity. This way we can asses the
network’s density, a property that may be roughly defined as the degree to which the friends of the friends of any given member (that is, his or her indirect links) know the indirect links of others. Or to put it still more simply, by the degree to which everyone knows everyone else. In a dense network word of mouth travels fast, particularly when the content of the gossip is the violation of a local norm: an unreciprocated favor, an unpaid bet, an unfulfilled promise, a lie. To the extent that this circulating information is remembered by enough neighbors we can say that the community as a whole stores personal reputations. If to this collective memory we add the ability to perform simple behavioral punishments, like ridicule or ostracism, the community as a whole can enforce local norms. True, in any one case, the neighbors laughing behind my back or refusing to interact with me are concrete persons, but to the extent that the details of their identity do not matter – this group of neighbors is ridiculing me now but the humiliation would be the same if it was a different group of neighbors – it is the community as a whole that
performs the punitive functions.
!
The property of density, and the capacity to store reputations and enforce norms, are non-reducible properties and capacities of the entire community, but neither involves thinking of it as a seamless totality in which the members’
personal identity is created by their relations: neighbors can pack their things and move to a different community while keeping their identity intact. A similar point applies to institutional organizations, like bureaucratic agencies, hospitals,
universities, factories. Many organizations are characterized by the possession of an authority structure in which rights and obligations are distributed in a
hierarchical way. But the exercise of authority must be backed by legitimacy if enforcement costs are to be kept within bounds. Legitimacy is an emergent
property of the entire organization even if it depends for its existence on personal beliefs about its source: a legitimizing tradition, a set of written regulations, or even for small organizations, the charisma of a leader. The degree to which
legitimate authority is irreducible to persons can, of course, vary from case to case. In particular, the more organizational resources are linked to an office or role (as opposed to the incumbent of that role) the more irreducible legitimacy is.
Nevertheless, and however centralized and despotic an organization may be, its members remain ultimately separable from it, their actual degree of autonomy depending on contingent factors about social mobility and the existence of opportunities outside the organization. It is this type of irreducible social whole produced by relations of exteriority, a whole that does not totalize its parts, that the
opening quote refers to. And it is these social wholes that we will refer to as “assemblages.”
!
The opening quote, on the other hand, does not employ the concept of emergence (or any of its synonyms, like synergy.) There are, however, two compelling reasons to include emergence as part of the definition of the term “assemblage”. First of all, without something ensuring the irreducibility of an assemblage, the concept would not be able to replace that of a seamless totality. If the parts of a whole are reducible, then they form a mere aggregate in which the components merely coexist without generating a new entity. Hence, irreducibility is implicit in the concept of assemblage. Second, making the properties of a whole depend on the interactions between its parts ensures that these properties are not taken to be neither necessary nor transcendent. When the properties of a given whole are taken as a brute fact, and listed as the unexplained characteristics that the whole must possess in order to be an entity of a given kind, the list of necessary properties swiftly becomes an essence. Ontologically, essences belong to a different plane than the entities whose identity they define, a transcendent plane overflying that which the entities populate. But if the properties are viewed as
produced by the interactions between components, and their existence and
endurance explained by the continuity of these interactions, then the properties are
contingent: if the interactions cease to take place the emergent properties cease to
exist. To return to the previous examples, if all neighbors stop interacting with one another by having conversations (so gossip about local norm violation can spread), or if they all stop reciprocating favors or keeping promises, the capacity of the community to store reputations and punish violations ceases to exist. If the
members of an organization stop obeying orders and filing reports, the legitimacy of the authority structure is compromised. The right interactions between neighbors or employees must take place on a day to day basis for the community or the
organization to have the properties and capacities that they do: the latter are contingent on the former.
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These contributions of the concept of emergence can help us understand the other important characteristic mentioned in the opening quote: that social wholes must be considered to be peripheral or to exist alongside their parts. This is clearly not a reference to relations in space, as if communities or organizations existed nearby or to one side of the persons that compose them. The reference is not spatial but ontological: the whole exists alongside the parts in the same ontological plane. In other words, the whole is immanent not transcendent. Communities or
organizations, to stick to these examples, are as historically individuated as the persons that compose them. While it is true that the term “individual” has come to refer to persons (or organisms in the case of animals and plants) it is perfectly coherent to speak of individual communities, individual organizations, individual cities, or individual countries. In this extended sense the term “individual” has no preferential affinity for a particular scale (persons or organisms) and refers to any entity that is singular or historically unique. Unlike philosophical approaches that make a strong ontological distinction between levels of existence (such as genus,
species, organism) here all entities must be thought of as existing at the same ontological level differing only in scale. The human species, for example, is every bit as much a historical individual as the organisms that compose it. Like them, it has a date of birth (the event of speciation) and, at least potentially, a date of death (the event of extinction). In other words, the human species as a whole exists “alongside” the human organisms that compose it, alongside them in an ontological plane populated only by historically individuated entities.
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Armed with this replacement for seamless totalities, let’s return to the question of human history. Historical explanations are inevitably shaped by the ontological presuppositions of the historians who frame them. Historians may be roughly divided into two groups along the lines suggested in the opening
paragraph, that is, depending on which of the terms of the following binary
oppositions they favor: “the individual versus society”, “agency versus structure”, “choice versus order”. Taking the side of the first terms in these dichotomies yields narratives in which persons, typically “great men”, have shaped events, situations, or the outcomes of particular struggles, through their ideas and actions. This does not necessarily imply a disbelief in the existence of society as a whole, only a conception of it that makes it into an epiphenomenon: society is a sum or aggregate of many rational agents or many phenomenological experiences shaped by daily routine. Taking the side of the second terms, on the other hand, yields narratives framed in terms of the transformations that enduring social structures have
undergone. The best known example of this is the sequence feudalism-capitalism-socialism. As before, there is no implication here that persons do not exist only that they are mere epiphenomena: persons are socialized as they grow up in families and attend schools, and after they have internalized the values of their societies their obedience to traditional regulations and cultural values can be taken for granted.
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The late economic historian Fernand Braudel broke with both of these traditional stances when he set out to study the history of Western economies taking as his subject “society as a set of sets.” 2 The characters in his narratives
include such diverse entities as communities, organizations, cities, and the urban regions formed by several interacting towns of different sizes. Persons are featured too but not as great men, while larger entities, like kingdoms, empires, world-economies, are treated not as abstract social structures but as concrete historical individuals, referred to by a proper name. Speaking of a “sets of sets” is another way of saying that the variety of forms of historical agency (communal agency, organizational agency, urban agency, imperial agency) are related to one another as parts to wholes. Braudel’s is a multi-scaled social reality in which each level of scale has its own relative autonomy and hence, its own history. History ceases to be constituted by a single temporal flow – the short time scale at which personal agency operates or the longer time scales at which social structure changes – and becomes a multiplicity of flows, each with its own variable rates of change, its own accelerations and decelerations.
Braudel’s vision can be enriched by replacing his sets, or sets of sets, with the irreducible and decomposable wholes just discussed, that is, with assemblages (and assemblages of assemblages). Let’s illustrate this with a specific example, one that combines Braudel’s data with an ontology of individual entities constraining the field of valid historical actors. In this ontology, an entity like “the Market” would not be an acceptable entity to be incorporated into explanations of historical phenomena because it is not an individual emergent whole but a reified generality. But the marketplaces or bazaars that have existed in every urban center since antiquity, and more recently in every European town since the 11th century, are indeed individual entities and can therefore figure as actors in explanations of the rise of Europe, and of the commercial revolution that characterized the early centuries of the second millennium. Equally valid are the regional trading areas that emerged when the towns that housed local marketplaces became linked together by roads and the trade among them reached a threshold of regularity and volume. Regional markets began to play an important economic role in Europe by the 14th century and, as historically constituted wholes composed of local
marketplaces, they are valid historical actors. So are the national markets that, starting in England in the 18th century, came into being by stitching together, sometimes forcefully, many provincial trading areas themselves composed of many regional markets. By the 19th century the railroad and the telegraph made the creation of national markets a simpler task and they emerged in places like France, Germany, and the United States, playing an important role in the economic history of those countries. 3 Today, we are witnessing the assembly of continental
markets, the European Common Market being a prime example, but this is still an unfinished historical task, one that could fail if its interacting national markets cease to give rise to an emergent whole.
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Up to the level of national markets the main emergent property of these increasingly larger trading areas is synchronized price movements. Braudel uncovers evidence that average wholesale prices (determined mostly by demand and supply) move up and down in unison within urban regions, provinces, or entire countries. But in addition to these commercial “sets of sets” Braudel also examines the very different dynamic created by international trade, a dynamic that has
existed in the West since the 14th century. The reason why international trade is treated differently is that it tends to connect trading areas in which demand and supply are entirely disconnected, creating price differentials that can be taken advantage to generate very large profits. Today’s global trade include many areas in which wage differentials generate the same opportunities. But to the extent that these profits arise by manipulating demand and supply – as opposed to by making decentralized decisions based on the information about demand and supply carried by prices – international trade (and the maritime cities and organizations behind it) constitute a different economic entity than local, regional, provincial, and national markets. Thus, instead of postulating a single macro-entity (the Market, the
Capitalist System), Braudel focuses on dynamics operating at different scales, and is able to capture the heterogeneity of practices and variety of social entities that constitute the real agents of economic history.
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In a similar way, other reified generalities, like “the State” should also be replaced. As argued above, in addition to communities a set of interacting persons can give rise to institutional organizations possessing emergent properties like legitimacy. Organizations, in turn, can interact to form a larger emergent whole like the industrial network formed by General Motors, its hundreds of suppliers and many distributors (car dealerships). And similarly for governments. A typical federal government, for example, is a whole in which many organizations are arranged in a hierarchical way with authority operating at different scales: some have a jurisdiction that extends to the entire country; others have authority only within the boundaries of a province or state; and yet others operate within the limits of an urban center and its surrounding region. When it comes to the
implementation of federal policies this nested set of overlapping jurisdictions can
be a powerful obstacle, many policies becoming distorted and weakened as they move from a decision made into law at the federal level, to a set of practices and procedures by different bureaucratic agencies, each possessing its own agenda and internal culture. Since these organizations themselves exists at different scales (national, provincial, urban) the problem of jurisdictional disputes and local veto powers can make the faithful implementation of federal policy highly problematic. This can help explain why many governments are so dysfunctional, an explanation not available to historians who use the concept of “the State” and the implied belief that governments are monolithic entities.
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Thus, both “the Market” and “the State” can be eliminated from a materialist ontology by a nested set of individual emergent wholes operating at different
scales. The expression “operating at different scale”, on the other hand, must be used carefully. In particular, it should refer only to relative scale, that is, to scale relative to the part-to-whole relation. Given the fact that any emergent whole has always a larger extension than the parts of which it is composed, this relative usage is unproblematic: communities or organizations are always larger than the persons that compose them. But the same is not true if the term “scale” is used in an
absolute sense. If instead of comparing a community with its own members, we compared the entire population of persons and the entire set of communities inhabiting a given country, for example, we would have to admit that both
populations are coextensive, that is, that they occupy the same amount of space: the entire national territory. And a similar point applies to the set of institutional
organizations. But even if we relativize the concept we may still disagree on the use of the expression “levels of scale” to distinguish social wholes. Why not use, for example, the expression “levels of organization”, a phrase used by biologists to characterize the part-to-whole relations between individual cells, individual organs, and individual organisms?. Because this concept carries with it connotations of increased complexity between levels, and in some cases, even teleological
implications, as when biological evolution is viewed as involving a drive to greater complexity, from unicellular organisms to multicellular ones. The expression “levels of scale”, on the other hand, carries no such connotations: a city is clearly
larger than a human being but there is no reason to believe that it possesses a higher degree of complexity than, say, the human brain.
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One final point needs to be clarified: when we say that a set of interacting persons gives rise to a community, or that a set of interacting organizations gives rise to a federal government, this should not be taken to imply a temporal
sequence, as if a set of previously disconnected persons or organizations had
suddenly began to interact and a whole had abruptly sprouted into being. In a few cases this may indeed be the case, as when people from a variety of war-stricken communities aggregate into a refugee camp and a larger whole emerges from their interactions; or when previously rival industrial organizations aggregate into a cartel forming a larger whole as they interact. But in the majority of cases the component parts come into being when a whole has already constituted itself and has begun to use its own emergent capacities to constrain and enable its parts: most people are born into communities that predate their birth, and most new
government agencies are born in the context of an already functioning central government. Nevertheless, the ontological requirement of immanence forces us to conceive of the identity of a community or of a central government as being
continuously produced by the day to day interactions between its parts. So we need to include in a materialist ontology not only the processes that produce the identity of a given social whole when it is born, but also the processes that maintain that identity through time.
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Let’s pause for a moment to consider how compatible these ideas are with those of Deleuze and Guattari. The first sign of incompatibility is that the
expression “the State” occurs throughout their work. But this term is often used as synonymous with “State apparatus”, a term that is much less objectionable since it can be taken to refer to the organizational apparatus of a given government, that is, to an emergent whole composed of many organizations. A more problematic term, one that is also often used in their historical explanations, is the term “social field” (or less often, “the socius”). This term does indeed refer to “society as a whole” and it is therefore not a valid historical actor in the materialist ontology being sketched here. It is unclear, for example, just what kind of entity this “social field” is supposed to be. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between different kinds of social wholes: strata and assemblages. A State apparatus is classified by them as a stratum. 4 Tightly-knit communities, with their capacity to police their
members and punish violations of local norms, would also be a stratum. But an alliance or coalition of several heterogenous communities, such as those involved in a social justice movement, would be considered an assemblage. So we face the problem of whether to treat the “social field” as a stratum or as an assemblage.
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A different but related problem is that distinguishing between different kinds of wholes can open the back door for reified generalities (the Stratum, the
Assemblage). To avoid this danger we can use a single term and build into it “control knobs” (or more technically, parameters) that can have different settings at different times: for some settings the social whole would be a stratum, for other
settings an assemblage. The term “parameter” comes from scientific models of physical processes. In these models variables specify the different ways in which the object being studied is free to change (its “degrees of freedom”) while
parameters specify the environmental factors that affect the object. Temperature can be a variable, the internal temperature of a body of water, for example, as well as a parameter quantifying the temperature of the water’s surroundings. Parameters are normally kept constant in a laboratory to study an object under repeatable circumstances, but they may also be allow to vary causing drastic changes in the object under study: while for many values of a parameter like temperature only a quantitative change will be produced, at critical points a body of water will
spontaneously change qualitatively, abruptly transforming from a liquid to a solid, or from a liquid to a gas. By analogy, we can add parameters to concepts. Adding these control knobs to the concept of assemblage, would allow us to eliminate their opposition to strata, with the result that strata and assemblages would become
phases, like the solid and fluid phases of matter. Unlike mutually exclusive binary
categories, phases can be transformed into one another, and even coexist as mixtures, like a gel that is a mixture of the solid and liquid phases of different materials.
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Deleuze and Guattari routinely establish oppositions between kinds (trees and rhizomes, striated and smooth spaces) only to backtrack later as they discuss the ways in which one kind can be transformed into another, or form hybrid mixtures. Thus, the strategy I will follow here will be to keep a single term, the term “assemblage”, and parametrize it to allow it to exhibit qualitatively different phases. For some values of the parameter the identity of an assemblage may be stable and resistant to change, while for other values its identity may become destabilized and enter into a process of becoming something else. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the quantity controlled by this parameter, or variable coefficient, as the degree of “territorialization” and “deterritorialization” of the assemblage. Thus, Deleuze writes: “What must be compared in each case are the movements of deterritorialization and the processes of reterritorialization which appear in an assemblage. But what do they mean, these words that Felix invents to make them into variable coefficients?.” 5
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Before answering this important question let’s summarize what has been said about assemblages so far:
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1) Assemblages have a fully contingent historical identity, and each of them is therefore an individual entity: an individual person, an individual community, an individual organization, an individual city. Because the ontological status of all assemblages is the same, entities operating at different scales can directly interact with one another, individual to individual, a possibility that does not exist in a hierarchical ontology, like that composed of genera, species, and individuals.
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2) Assemblages are always composed of heterogenous components. It could be objected that the examples examined so far, communities and organizations,
seem to be made out of homogenous parts: persons. The objection is indeed correct. To properly apply the concept of assemblage to real cases we need to include, in addition to persons, the material and symbolic artifacts that also compose communities and organizations: the architecture of the buildings that house them; the myriad different tools and machines used in offices, factories, and kitchens; the various sources of food, water, and electricity; the many symbols and icons with which they express their identity. The day to day practices of neighbors and coworkers take place in well defined locales populated by heterogenous
material and expressive objects, so any concrete community or organization, when
treated as an assemblage, must include these locales explicitly.
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3) Assemblages can become component parts of larger assemblages. Communities can form alliances or coalitions and become a larger assemblage, a social justice movement, for example, and organizations can form industrial networks and complex governments. To conceptualize the nested set of assemblages that can exist in any one historical period we can use the terms “micro” and “macro” as long as we use them in a relative sense, that is, not to apply them to single persons and overall societies. Compared to the communities that they compose, people are micro while communities are macro. But
communities are micro relative to the larger social justice movements that they can form. Similarly, a bureaucratic agency is macro relative to the persons that
compose it, but micro relative to the larger government to which it belongs.
Deleuze and Guattari use the terms “molecular”and “molar” for micro and macro. The way they picture the dynamics that occur in the nested set of assemblages is something like this. At any one of the nested levels, assemblages exist as part of
populations: populations of persons, pluralities of communities, multiplicities of
organizations, collectivities of urban centers, and it is from the interactions within these populations that larger assemblages emerge as a statistical result, or as a collective unintended consequence of intentional action. In a given population some entities may get caught into larger molar wholes, while other may remain free, composing a molecular collectivity. This means that a whole at a given scale is composed not only of molar entities at the immediately lower scale but also of smaller molecular parts.
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4) Assemblages emerge from the interactions between their parts, but once an assemblage is in place it immediately starts acting as a source of limitations and opportunities for its components. The capacity of a closed-knit community to enforce local norms, and the capacity of an organization to impose rules and obedience to commands, are clearly a source of constraints to their human
components. But a closed-knit community also tends to be solidary, an emergent property that provides a resource to its members when it comes to political
mobilization. And similarly for the resources available to members of an
organization, from the emergent effects of team work to the efficiencies created by large scale. Philosophically, this double determination is important: wholes emerge in a bottom-up way, depending causally on their components, but they have a top-down influence on them. The upward causality is necessary to make emergent
properties immanent: an assemblage’s properties may be irreducible to its parts but that does not make them transcendent, since they would cease to exist if the parts stopped interacting with one another. The downward causality is needed to account for the fact that most assemblages are composed of parts that come into existence after the whole has emerged. Most of the buildings or neighborhoods that compose a modern city, for example, were not only created after the urban center’s own birth, but their defining properties were constrained by the city’s zoning laws, and their creation made possible by the city’s wealth.
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Let’s move on to characterize the different parameters that must be built into the concept of assemblage. As just mentioned the first parameter quantifies the
degree of territorialization and deterritorialization of an assemblage.
Territorialization refers not only to the determination of the spatial boundaries of a whole – as in the territory of a community, city, or nation state – but also to the degree to which an assemblage’s component parts are drawn from a homogenous repertoire, or the degree to which an assemblage homogenizes its own components. When a community is densely connected, we can expect a reduction of personal differences and an increased degree of conformity. But in normal circumstances, this mild degree of territorialization may be compatible with some personal variation. However, when two or more communities engage in ethnic or religious conflict, not only the geographical boundaries of their neighborhoods or small towns will be policed more intensely, so will the behavior of their members. The distinction between “us” and “them” will sharpen and any small deviation from local norms will be noticed and punished. Conflict, in other words, tends to
increase the degree of territorialization of communities, a fact that may be captured conceptually by a changing in the setting of this parameter.
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The second parameter quantifies an assemblage’s degree of coding and
decoding. Coding refers to the role played by special expressive components in an
assemblage in fixing the identity of a whole. The two best known expressive
components with a specialized function are chromosomes and languages. Since we are considering here only social wholes let’s focus on the latter. In institutional organizations, for example, the legitimacy of an authority structure is in most cases related to linguistically coded rituals and regulations: in organizations in which authority is based on tradition, these will tend to be legitimizing narratives
contained in some sacred text, while in those governed by a rational-legal form of authority they will be written rules, standard procedures, and most importantly, a constitutional charter defining the organization’s rights and obligations. While all organizations are coded in this sense, a state apparatus performs coding operations that affect an entire territory and all the communities and organizations that inhabit it. The more despotic or totalitarian a state apparatus the more everything becomes coded: dress, food, manners, property, trade. Because many archaic states allowed the communities over which they ruled to keep their own social codes,
superimposing on them a dominant code, Deleuze and Guattari refer to this operation as “overcoding”. 6
An assemblage in which both parameters are set to high intensity is
equivalent to a stratum. In other words, strata are nothing but highly territorialized and coded assemblages. Conversely, what Deleuze and Guattari normally refer to as an “assemblage” is a stratum that has become decoded, that is, one in which the value of the coding parameter is low, as when animal behavior stops being
determined by genes, or when human behavior ceases to be fully specified by written norms. As they write: “Assemblages are already different from strata. They are produced in the strata, but operate in zones where milieus become decoded.” 7
Let’s examine in more detail the first case, assemblages with high values for both parameters. First of all, as in the case of mathematical parameters, we must define what the parameters stand for. A parametrized equation is basically an equation with knobs. The latter may stand for actual knobs in a piece of laboratory
equipment (knobs which may be tuned to change an artificial phenomenon’s environment) or to factors that affect a given natural phenomenon’s environment. So what do the knobs built into the concept of assemblage stand for?. They refer to the objective articulatory processes that yield a molar whole from a population of molecular parts. The identity of an objective stratum is therefore determined by a process that Deleuze and Guattari call “double articulation”. As they write:
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“Each stratum exhibits phenomena of double articulation ... The first
articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units (substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms). The second articulation establishes
functional, compact, stable substances (forms), and constructs the molar
compounds in which these structures are simultaneously actualized (substances). In a geological stratum, for example, the first articulation is the process of
“sedimentation” which deposits units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical order: flysch, with its succession of sandstone and schist. The second articulation is the “folding” that sets up a stable functional structure and effects the passage from sediment to sedimentary rock.” 8
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In this example, the molecular population is made out of small pebbles and the molar whole is the larger sedimentary rock that these pebbles eventually form. We must, however, correct an error in this description. The synthesis of
sedimentary rock proceeds by the sorting out of pebbles of different size and composition, an operation performed by the rivers that transport and deposit the pebbles in homogenous layers at the bottom of the ocean. These loose
accumulations are then cemented together and transformed into layers of
sedimentary rock, that is, into an entity with emergent properties not present in the component pebbles. Then, at a different scale, many of these layers of rock
accumulate on top of one another and are then folded by the clash of tectonic plates to produce a larger emergent entity: a folded mountain range like the Himalayas or the Rocky Mountains. We will see below that this is not the only place where Deleuze and Guattari fail to make a distinction between different scales. But the ease with which the mistake can be corrected shows that the concept of a double articulation is robust against simple errors and, more importantly, capable of
multiple variations that accommodate the complexity of actual strata. That is, the first articulation does not have to involve sorting into internally homogenous sets, although sorting operations do indeed appear in different spheres: the selection pressures exerted by predators and parasites sort out genetic materials and increase their homogeneity, and the use of technical examinations in the recruitment of staff for organizations sorts people out into uniform sets. But the homogenizing effects of the first articulation may take place through a variety of mechanisms. And similarly for the second articulation, a consolidation operation that can take a variety of forms, such as the reproductive isolation of an animal community that prevents extraneous genes from other species to flow into their gene pool.
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When I first introduced these two articulations I defined the second one, coding, as involving a specialized expressive component (genes, words), but the geological example shows that coding can be present even before the advent of the genetic code. Nevertheless, the appearance of genetic materials capable of
information-storage and self-replication was indeed a crucial event, an event that changed the very nature of the process of double articulation. While before the rise of living creatures all expression was three dimensional – the geometry of a
crystal, for example, was what expressed its identity – genes are a one-dimensional form of expression, a linear chain of nucleotides, and this linearization allowed material expressivity to gain a degree of autonomy from its material base and to become highly specialized. As Deleuze and Guattari put it:
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“Before, the coding of a stratum was coextensive with that stratum; on the organic stratum, on the other hand, it takes place on an autonomous and
independent line that detaches as much as possible from the second and third dimensions. ...The essential thing is the linearity of the nucleic sequence. ... It is the crystal’s subjugation to three-dimensionality, in other words, its index of territoriality, that makes the structure incapable of formally reproducing and expressing itself; only the accessible surface can reproduce itself, since it is the only deterritorializable part. On the contrary, the detachment of a pure line of expression on the organic stratum makes it possible for the organism to attain a much higher threshold of deterritorialization, gives it a mechanism of reproduction covering all the details of its complex spatial structure, and enables it to put all its interior layers topologically in contact with the exterior, or rather with the
polarized limit (hence the special role of the living membrane).” 9
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Language emerges in a similar way except that its linearity is now temporal not spatial, involving an even more intense deterritorialization that makes it
independent of its formed materiality. This is what gives language the ability to represent all other strata, to translate “all of the flows, particles, codes, and territorialities of the other strata into a sufficiently deterritorialized system of signs...”. 10 And this capacity to represent or translate all other strata is, in turn,
what gives language, or more exactly language-based theories, their “imperialist pretensions”. In other words, the obsession with language that took place in the twentieth century after the so-called “linguistic turn”, forming the basis for the
rejection of materialism and the spread of conservative idealism, can be explained within the theory of double articulation as a result of the unique status of this specialized line of expression. Thus explained, the power of language can be accepted while the conceptual obstacle represented by its illegitimate extension circumvented. In what follows I will use my own version of the concept of
assemblage, in which strata are just the phase that results when the two parameters have high values, but these remarks should make it easier to move back and forth to the original version in which strata and assemblages are different kinds of wholes.
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Armed with this parametrized concept we can now move back to the
question of human history and a more detailed treatment of the different levels of scale at which historical events take place. Since we reject macro-reductionism as much as micro-reductionism, we must take individual persons seriously, as long as the subjectivity of each person is itself conceived as emerging from the interactions between sub-personal components. From the philosopher David Hume, Deleuze derives a conception of the subject or person as an entity emerging from the interactions of a heterogeneous population of sense impressions, and of
low-intensity replicas of those impressions (ideas). These sub-personal components are assembled through the habitual application of certain operators to the ideas. More specifically, a subject crystallizes in the mind through the habitual grouping of ideas via relations of contiguity; their habitual comparison through relations of resemblance; and the habitual perception of constant conjunction of cause and effect that allows one idea (that of the cause) to always evoke another (the effect). Contiguity, causality, and resemblance, as relations of exteriority between ideas, constitute the three kinds of association that transform a mind into a subject. 11
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Deleuze never gave a full assemblage analysis of subjectivity, but it is possible to derive one from his work on Hume. His most extensive discussion of relations of exteriority occurs, in effect, in his discussion of the empiricists. Deleuze warns us that the history of philosophy gives us an impoverished idea of what the empiricists achieved: the intelligible comes from the sensible. Or in more contemporary terms, theoretical statements should be reduced to observation statements, a program for epistemology that everyones agrees has failed. So what then is their achievement.? To have established external relations between sensual or intellectual components of experience. As he writes:
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“…in effect if relations are external and irreducible to their terms, then the difference cannot be between the sensible and the intelligible, between experience and thought, between sensation and ideas, but only between two sorts of ideas, or two sorts of experiences, that of terms and that of relations… In Hume there are ideas and then there are relations between these ideas, relations which may vary without the ideas varying, and then the circumstances, actions, and passions which make these relations vary. A complete ‘Hume assemblage’ which takes on the most varied figures.” 12
